341–350 of 460 posts
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Gun to the head = the pressure of an interview?
Yes, one maybe two pass/fail questions at random, $200k in a suitcase, clock ticking, pride/family/livelihood on the line, (unintentionally) smug host watching your every move. Any problem is trivial easy once you've solved it ten times. The otherwise ridiculous film Swordfish has a similar scene with higher stakes.
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Hey, if a candiate is ready to be an asshole in an interview, what are the chances that he will be an asshole to his team members to just get that raise or a promotion?
He's not being an asshole. He's probably stressed out and doesn't know how to cope well. This is behavior that can be addressed and improved. After 20 years and hiring 100+ developers through three exits and an IPO, I've only met 1 actual "asshole" that couldn't integrate and needed to be let go. The problem is that we're too quick to be offended and we look for excuses. I'm in the middle of hiring a business analyst…
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When hiring managers talk about “passion” what they usually mean is that they want to hire a geek who is willing to work crazy hours because of a love of programming and won’t dare negotiate for higher pay or leave for a job that will pay them more.
I've heard this distinction before, and I think it's a difference in the base quality of the place. My last three jobs all put "passion" as a major hiring criteria, but all maintained a strong work/life balance (average work week was 40 hours give or take a few, and though crunch times happened more than a few weeks a year was considered a bad thing. I conducted plenty of interviews myself and helped write interview…
Come on, you can't leave us hanging like this... What happened there? :)
I think hiring has become more difficult now that programming has been discovered as a well paying mainstream career. When I started in the 90s most people I worked with had a passion for the craft but now I find we interview a lot of people who have a CS degree just for the career prospects but not out of interest for the craft. I find it much easier to deal with someone who has no relevant experience but cares vs s…
The art, I think, in hiring and managing is how to build useful things even when you can't rely on everyone intrinsically caring and being self-driven. If you wait to find a dozen, fifty, a hundred people who care, you might miss out on a lot of opportunities.
I get the sentiment but I have two problems with this. 1) Different stages of companies require different hires. When you're starting out, find the hungry ones. They'll get better at programming if they care, and they'll build a lot of stuff. Once you have real customers and are growing like crazy, hire experienced people to help you scale. 2) There is a difference between the "interview process" and the screening pr…
"Years of experience" is a very misleading metric. Someone could have 2 years of experience but be more motivated and/or have worked in a more demanding environment than someone with 5 years of experience. seniority !== skill
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How little are you paying your dev that it can be 1/8th of a contractor? Even the cheapest dev I have ever met in London wasn't as low as 1/5th of the most expensive contractor I have met.
Ah yeh, sorry, my mental maths strayed a bit into hyperbole there, it's more like 4-5x
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How little are you paying your dev that it can be 1/8th of a contractor? Even the cheapest dev I have ever met in London wasn't as low as 1/5th of the most expensive contractor I have met.
Ah yeh, sorry, my mental maths strayed a bit into hyperbole there, it's more like 4-5x
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Senior is ten years +/- a year depending on what they accomplished in my opinion.
Your opinion is not the established nomenclature. Senior is widely understood to be 4 yr degree + 5 yrs experience. This means you have all the technical training plus enough professional experience to be considered fluent. At ten years you should be absolutely expert in the areas you've worked in. This is staff or senior staff level, if you also have some business acumen, ie the ability to see beyond engineering req…
Having hired folks who weren't proven, most didn't work out. However, the ones who did work out were great. One difference that stood out beyond courage and attitude is how engaged in actualizing one's potential the candidate is. Everyone has potential. The person doing the hiring may see it. The candidate may, or may not. The only thing that mattered in the end was the candidates ability to actualize their own poten…
You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the prince this way. It can be very time consuming. If your company has more time than money - it's a reasonable strategy.
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30-50%(used to be 90%) of any programming job is doing crap you didn't know how to do before. If they have a proven track record of figuring things out experience is minimally valuable.
> If they have a proven track record of figuring things out experience is minimally valuable. I can't understand this point of view at all. When Google wanted to build the world's best JS JIT they didn't hire anyone who was generally able to figure things out - they hired the person with the most experience in building dynamic language JITs in the world. Experience is everything! Experience is knowing which rabbit ho…
And then there is the issue of actually retaining top talent...